5 tips to improve your website's search ranking

12 February 2016

Here are the 5 top things you should be doing to get your website ranking highly:

1. ALL OF YOUR WEB PAGES SHOULD HAVE UNIQUE AND DESCRIPTIVE TITLES AND DESCRIPTIONS

Title: The title of your page should be short and highly descriptive. It appears in the tabs of your browser, and is the large text is search results. The title should be no longer than 55-60 characters long.

Description: The page description is a huge factor in what comes up in searches so this needs to be very descriptive of your page. Make sure this is no longer than 160 characters long.

Extra note: DO NOT stuff these with keywords, they should describe what the visitor will find when the enter the site - if Google (or others) find you keyword stuffing you will be penalised!

2. CONTENT IS KING

Your site should be full of interesting content that is kept up to date regularly, note the word interesting, we will be coming to that in a minute.

Making sure your site has content should probably be your number 1 priority when running a website. This does not mean stuffing the page with text, filling every bit of space, no never do this! You should be using a blog (or similar) to keep your site up to date with fresh content, search engines love new content and it keeps your site pushing at that glorious top spot. It may seem like no one is reading what you write, but trust me they are, just keep on powering on and you will soon see the benefits!

Now, we said we would come on to interesting content. Your content should 100% be interesting, the reason is because people will then link to it and share it, this is huge for SEO, getting links to your site from other reputable sites will send you rocketing to the top!

3. USE MEDIA TO YOUR ADVANTAGE

Media. Is. Great. You should be using lots of images and videos in your content and when sharing on social media, it gets way more attention than just text, tweets with images for example get 150% more retweets than without!

It isn't just good for sharing though, search engines love it, sites with just text tend to be boring so they look out for when sites are using media effectively in their content and will reward you for doing so.

Tip for images: When using images, make sure you add alt text, search engines find it hard to read images like humans so this text lets them know what it is and also when the image doesn't appear. Make sure you are descriptive of the image!

Tip for video: Get the video on YouTube (or another service) and make sure you transcribe the video, this means adding text to the video which writes down what is being said. Good for the deaf audience so they can still watch the video, and also great for SEO as search engines can read this text and not so much the video.

4. MAKE SURE YOUR WEBSITE IS MOBILE-READY

Internet traffic on mobile phones and tablets has already surpassed people using desktop computers or laptops, yet so many websites are still not mobile ready!

All big search engines will rank your site a lot lower if it does not cater to the mobile market, and this punishment is only going to get stronger as the mobile market expands further.

5. LINK BETWEEN YOUR PAGES, LOTS

A lot of people get the idea that you should only link to pages outside of your own site, this is wrong.

You should be linking to other pages within your site as this creates a strong bond between the content and also allows users to easily navigate to other relevant pages, keeping them on the site for longer. A strong bond is essential for a good search presence, it shows search engines how the content is linked together. For example if one of your articles gets massive publicity and is linked to other articles, they will all get a boost rather than the single page, keep that in mind.

IN CONCLUSION

These are just some basic, super simple things you can do to help boost your site up search rankings. you should get into a habit of using all of the above in your day to day site running and you will be a pro in no time!